I have been working on automating my organizations Active Directory/Exchange user provisioning, and needed a method to easily log what actions are taken. To accomplish this, I decided to write a couple PowerShell logging functions that I could integrate into my other functions for creating the user, creating the mailbox, generating approval emails, and assigning groups. The functions I came up with are Start-Log, Write-Log, and Stop Log.
Month: May 2015
Deploy and Schedule SQL Maintenance
Perhaps the most fundamental DBA task is to configure proper SQL maintenance on all of your instances. There are many ways to approach this, including SSIS-based GUI-driven maintenance plans, custom homebrewed T-SQL scripts, PowerShell scheduled jobs, or third-party applications. However, my (and many other’s) preferred solution is to use Ola Hallengren’s fantastic maintenance scripts (ola.hallengren.com). This solution is recommended by many people for good reason. It provides a good amount of flexibility, compatibility, as well as a solid amount of logging. You can use this solution right out of the box and it will work great, but I like to tweak it a bit to better fit my needs and be a little easier to apply.
Report Failed SQL Jobs
One of the first things I check when I get to the office in the morning is any SQL agent jobs that failed overnight. Our monitoring system will also pick these up, but I like to have a condensed report with the failed production jobs, job step(s) that failed, and error message so that I can quickly diagnose what went wrong. We already had a script in place which mostly worked, based on this, but I wanted to modify it a bit to return some more useful information.